Carbonite Online Backup

Hopefully Earl’s link will work for you. If it doesn’t invest in an USB external drive enclosure that matches your drives dimensions. Take the Drive out of the dead computer and hook it up to a computer that is functional. The other computer should recognize it and allow you to browse the directory structure and move any files that you want to make sure to have a copy of. You then have two options you can either Buy a new HD and reinstall Windows or you can reinstall on the old HD just keep in mind everything will be wiped out.

I also Highly recommend a service such as carbonite. It is important to continue to have backups locally as well but they do and will fail at the wrong time. The nice thing with Carbonite and other services like that, they have invested in the infrastructure to have multiple layers of redundancy so the likely hood of them loosing your data is very very slim.

Let us know if you need any more help. I know there are several of us IT guys out here.

Your say

Carbonite version 3.7.6 was released over the weekend. This now means that Carbonite is fully compatible with Windows 7. In addition, all users also get enhancements to the restore window, providing more ways to search for files that need to be restored.

All new trial users will automatically be given Carbonite 3.7.6. Users on older versions can upgrade by logging into their account and reinstalling Carbonite. A prompt to upgrade will go out to all users over the coming week.

Your say

Data backup companies are wasting no time touting their new, upgraded Windows 7-compatible backup systems for desktops, laptops, servers and online storage. But little or nothing has been upgraded in the actual backup apparatus—it’s virtually all in the user interface.

With the official launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 on Oct. 22, the requisite announcements from myriad companies with products that support the new operating system are coming fast and furious.

This certainly holds true for a growing number of data backup companies that are wasting no time touting their new, upgraded Windows 7-compatible backup systems for desktops, laptops, servers and online storage.

Microsoft includes its own backup system in Windows 7 with the System Image and Backup feature. However, many users prefer their own trusted third-party backup software, and just about all the most well-known providers in the sector have announced upgrade versions that support Windows 7. These include Symantec’s Veritas, Arkeia Software, BakBone Software, Memeo, Connected, Dantz, RepliWeb, Seagate i365, Iron Mountain Digital and iDrive.

But this raises some questions: What exactly are you getting when you buy a “Windows 7-supported” backup system, whether online or not? How much difference does the operating system make?

And exactly how much of a marketing opportunity is this, anyway? A big one, apparently. Plenty of people believe that as soon as the new operating system comes out, they need to go out and buy a new “optimized” backup for it. This is certainly not always the case.

“The short answer: It doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using (we support XP, Vista, Win 7 and Mac OS),” David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, told eWEEK.

And were whatever changes Carbonite had to make for Windows 7 all about UI?

“Pretty much,” Friend said. “For example, the Win 7 Explorer has a different API, so to put our little green dots on files and folders required some code to be rewritten.”

But that was it.

So outside of a little extra code written to make the UI meld correctly with Windows 7, there is really nothing new in Windows 7 backup—no matter how splashy the “Win 7-optimized” ads and marketing materials may appear.

Your say

Every time my family travels on Home Office Highway, I load up a flash drive with documents, files and notes for stories and columns in progress.

This year, except for a flash-drive built into a card reader for my camera, I brought no portable drive.

All my documents, files and notes were / are stored in the Cloud. Notes for my columns, interviews for pending stories, even all the notes related to our destinations, RV parks and other trip details were stored either to Google Notes, Gmail or Google Docs.

About a month ago, I subscribed to Carbonite. This online data back-up and retrieval service not only is good for data security. Remote access makes all my documents and files accessible for any Internet-connected computer anywhere. I can fetch documents, images, videos – the lot.

Is this a leap of faith? Road warriors and teleworkers work from The Cloud without a second thought or moment’s hesitation. Their office is the hotel room or executive suite or home office or driver’s seat. Their server is The Cloud. No cause for pause.

Get used to it, peeps. This type of faith is just a harbinger of experiences to come. Soon, in the not-too-distant future, everything we need to work (save the Internet connected PC itself) will be hosted in the Cloud. Our applications (Office, Open Office, art and design applications) and the data we create with them will be hosted on servers Out There. That’s already the case with so many of the social networking tools we use: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube – they’re all out there, just waiting for our user ID and password.

Increasingly, our data’s out there, too. If you blog, most blog entries are written and permanently stored exclusively on the blog engine.

All of these documents, data and applications are Out There and accessible via the Internet. On this year’s Home Office Highway, we moved further into The Cloud. But the reality was, we rarely strayed from civilization. Take a trip miles from the nearest cell antenna or deep into a canyon or dense woods, those places where Internet signals weaken and service grows spotty, and you could be lost – adrift and removed from the precious Cloud.

This this year was no true leap of faith. I had faith that all my stuff would be nearby — as the Cloud would be, too. Take that trip farther along roads less traveled, where clouds disperse and work yields to release, and I may find that a flash drive stuffed with docs would be a welcome addition.

Or one whose absence would allow me to enjoy the environs that much more.

Jeff Zbar is on the road with his family in one teched-out, Internet-connected RV-turned-home-office – exploring the American South, visiting small towns and popular tourist destinations – and revealing just how productive a traveling family can be. Driven by Jeff Zbar, the Chief Home Officer, Home Office Highway shines headlights on a whole new “remote” office. Learn more at www.homeofficehighway.com.

Your say

This is a great article on how to backup your Google Apps

So many of us these days are jumping on the Google bandwagon making the most of the ’so many’ services that Google has to offer the home PC user as well as the very small business person. Services like Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, have you ever considered what could happen to these files (your files) if Google loses them or even denies you access to them? This is particularly relevant if they are personal or business files. I am sure (and I haven’t read them myself) their T/Cs ensure they have every right to determine if the files stay online or not, at the end of the day it’s their servers.

It would be wise to ensure that your most sensitive information is in your control.
Automatically back up your Gmail account

The easiest way to create a local backup of your Gmail account is probably through POP access with a desktop based email application like Thunderbird, which is also free. It is also cross platform and comes with easy Gmail setup already provided. There are others taht you can also use eg MS Outlook.

Obviously you then need to consider backing up your email client to ensure that should your PC die, you data and emails don’t die with it. Using something as simple as Carbonite is ideal for the home PC or small business user.

This is where to go to find out how to backup Thunderbird.

Another simple step you can take is to forward all incoming email to a secondary email account with Gmail. That means you can back up to a secondary Gmail or Yahoo! email address.
Backup Google Calendar

If you’re looking to back up Google Calendar, the best solution is to set up a complete bi-directional Gcal sync using the cross-platform GCalDaemon.

With GCalDaemon, not only can you ensure that you’ve always got a backup of your latest and greatest Google Calendar appointments and events, but you also get to add, edit, or delete those events from your desktop and watch as they sync back to Gcal.

If you are looking for something a little more basic, you can just subscribe to your calendar’s iCal feed to back up your events offline.
Backup Google Docs and Spreadsheets

The long way around this problem is to download them one at a time. Alternatively, if you are using Firefox, it allows you to back up all or select chunks of Google Docs and Spreadsheet files in various formats (including MS Office or Open Office formats, PDF, plain text, or CSV) in one simple step using Google Docs Download Greasemonkey script. The Google Doc Download Greasemonkey script adds a download link to the main Docs and Spreadsheets page that gives you quick access to download your docs in whatever format you want.

You will need to ensure that you regularly perform the backup step and then use something like Carbonite to secure it all.
Back up your Blogger blog

Bloggers can easily back up their Blogger accounts using Blogger Backup (Windows only). Simply point the program at your blogspot URL.

Your say

This is what a small business IT provider had to say in Australia:

Brisbane small-business owner Nathan Oldfield sells water filters online and backs up his business records with Carbonite. He recognised the service’s impact instantly.

“I have an IT background, so I know that the big thing about backups is to have them off-site,” Oldfield says.

“Queensland Water Filters is a very small business … and we could have saved our documents to disc and exchanged them with a mate but it’s a bit ad hoc.

“Knowing that documents are automatically and continually backed up off-site means if you lose something, it’s only about 10 or 15 minutes’ work at most. Then you can get online and retrieve the backed-up copy.”

Oldfield, who also runs an IT consultancy business, recommends Carbonite and similar email backup services to his clients. He has helped clients avoid the situation faced by ma.gnolia.com.

“I’ve never had to use it for myself, touch wood,” he says.

“But a client who runs a web design business had his site hacked. Doing backups to the cloud meant we could retrieve the information for him and get his site back up and running again.”

Your say

Great story, hope it’s true:

I just wanted to share this story to hopefully help others avoid a tragic mistake that so many experience everyday. I am an independent business, doing video post-production work for clients on all sorts of projects, large and small. I had historically backed up my data locally, replicating my hard drives on 2 or 3 external backup drives. About 4 months ago, however, during lunch with one of my clients, he mentioned that he had signed up with a new backup service called Carbonite. He liked the convenience of the service since he could simply let his backups run to a remote site and not have to worry about maintaining anything.

I was skeptical at first, since I didn’t like the idea of sending my critical information anywhere offsite. But my client raised a good point – a lot of Fortune 1000 companies are doing just this – using services such as Salesforce.com – outsourcing IT infrastructure is just the new way of doing things. If you want to compete, I remember him saying, you’ll need to focus on your core business and not have to worry about hot-swapping drives and power redundancy, etc.

Well, I decided to sign up for a trial of Carbonite, and after discovering that the service only costs around 5 bucks a month, wondered why I had spent all that time and money worrying about hard drives. Still, I thought the service had to be complex and would go down on me at some point, as do most online services (right when you need them). To my surprise, however, Carbonite was very easy to setup – it’s a lightweight application that installs on your computer in seconds, and then after a brief setup process where you tell the app which folders and files you want to backup, it does the rest for you. Much easier than configuring windows and various utility apps to replicate folders locally!

Anyways – the critical part of the story came months after setting Carbonite up. I live in the Los Angeles area, which is not exactly known for it’s tropical thunderstorms, but we had a bad storm one winter. I remember watching the TV and then suddenly everything went dead. Not a common occurrence, but I figured that it was just a routine power outage.

I few minutes later the power came back on and after checking on a few things in my apartment I wandered into my home office to do some work. I tried to boot up my computer, and nothing, It was dead. I tried everything and realized that both my computers were fried. So much for my power surge protectors, I later found out that mine was only rated up to 30 volts! So I lost 2 computers and all the data on those.

The crazy part was that I was just finishing up a huge animation project that was a 4 month contract with a major studio. I had gigabytes of files across all my drives that were lost. I took out my laptop and logged into Carbonite, crossing my fingers that the data was still there! To my relief, once I logged in, I found that all my data was there and ready to be downloaded.

Had I somehow lost all that data, I would have defaulted on a $50K+ contract, not to mention the ramifications on my business overall from losing out on a successful outcome with a marquee client. I can tell you that the experience was heart-wrenching, but the relief I felt from seeing all my data there safe in a remote data center somewhere just convinced me that backing up your data is just a good insurance policy that’s worth much more than the $7 a month it costs!

Hopefully my story will help others avoid a terrible outcome when disaster strikes – you just never know when something crazy and unexpected can happen!

Your say

My encounter with David Friend:

You probably missed it, but on my post about backup methods, I have been corresponding with Dave Friend, the CEO of Carbonite. Seems that he found out about my blog post and decided to do everything he could to look into my problem.

Color me impressed.

It’s so great to see a CEO so dedicated to the quality and public perception of his company that he takes the time to personally comment on blog entries. He also e-mailed me a number of times in order to try to help me with my problem.

Unfortunately, the end result was that they are aware that a few Mac users are having this sort of problem where the backup stalls. It’s not everyone, but it does affect some of us, and they are working on it. He also made sure that I got the refund I requested.

Given this level of service, I would love to be able to continue to use Carbonite, and offered to be a test subject as they try to fix this problem. I thought Carbonite was great for my PC. Unfortunately, I do want to be sure that my computer is backed up, and can’t afford to wait until the Carbonite problems are fixed.

Even though the end result is that I’m still not using Carbonite, I’m very happy with how this turned out. My opinion of the company is once again very positive, and I will be recommending them to all the PC users I encounter. Clearly, this is a company run by people who truly care about their product and their customers, and that’s so important.

So thank you, Dave Friend, for all your help and for your comments. You provide a great service to PC users (and most Mac users) and I trust that soon, Carbonite will be an excellent service on both platforms.

Your say

This is a review undertaken by TechwizBackup:

The two heavyweights in the online backup industry – Carbonite and Mozy – and the pros and cons of each.

If you’re looking at online storage, you know the two big heavyweights are in the field: Carbonite and Mozy. But if you put them in a boxing ring, let them knock it out, who wins by KO? For TechWizBackup, there are a few qualifiers that need to be explained before announcing the official winner.

Storage Space: Both Carbonite and Mozy Home versions offer unlimited space storage if you pay the monthly/annual fee. However, with Mozy, you get 2 GB of storage for free. Round 1 – Mozy.

Price: Annually, Carbonite is about $4.58 per month while Mozy is $4.35 per month, so they’re cents apart. But Carbonite also offers a 15-day free trial; Mozy does not but again they do offer up to 2 GB of space for free. Round 2 – Draw.

Ease-of-Use: Both are fairly user-friendly and easy to navigate although there was one common complaint among both users: it takes a while for the initial memory save but after that, timing wasn’t an issue. But to be fair, that’s a pretty common complaint among all online storage sites. Carbonite is a bit more direct and has an easier interface. Round 4- Carbonite.

Backup Process/Security: Both sites allow either scheduled or automatic backup options, so you can “set-and-forget.” In terms of security, bth are extremely safe, using all sorts of encryption methods likened to that used by the U.S. government. Round 3 – Draw.

Carbonite – 1 win, 1 draw; Mozy 1 win, 1 draw. It truly depends on your personal preference. If you plan on backing up anything larger than 2GB, I’d say the friendlier Carbonite user interface gives it a slight edge. Carbonite is my personal choice but I know many here who use and love Mozy. Test it out for yourself since Carbonite has a free trial offer and Mozy lets you store up to 2GB each. Let the best site win!

Your say

In order to go away on vacation properly, I had to update my laptop and had to do a whole lot of moving and shaking of files, for which I hired A Kid. The Kid was a great help except he forgot to clean up after himself after which I had to do the discarding and discarded the wrong thing. Had it not have been for Carbonite, I would have lost about 11,000 files. For $5 a month, this is soooooo worth it. I know that Carbonite doesn’t back up external hard drives, which means I have to keep the really critical stuff on my main drive, but it does not overwrite old files–not as far as I can see, so I got back everything. (I also discovered that I may have been able to regain the files with software called Recuva, which I think is free.) So that’s my report from the cyber frontier wars–with a happy ending.

Your say

Pinay Ads had a some downtime recently:

What I like about Carbonite is that they have their own twitter account. You can see their updates and even customer feedback.

Anyway, about my site, obviously it is up again. I just contacted my hosting support center. It was a bit inconvenient having my blog down for three hours but I’m glad I learned something new about backing up my files.

If your data or file is your life, and if you’re not backing it up regularly, you’re dealing with disaster. So backup your entire computer to save for the worst.

Your say

A sound review of Carbonite here!

Carbonite has a very simple interface, so easy, grandparents are actually subscribing to it to protect their family genealogy pictures and docs. It gives you unlimited backup for just AU$79.99. What does unlimited mean? It means you can backup as much as you want as long as it is on your PC. It’s new remote access service also gives you the ability to access your files over the net for anywhere you are. In reality though, online backup services are really there for your critical docs not for everything on your PC. Carbonite is great because it comes with almost 24/7 support via chat (US) and you can also talk to the local office.
Again a 30 day free trial is available. Give it a go.

Your say

The Carbonite team has taken a “backup for dummies” approach in designing their user interface, but don’t be fooled. Carbonite has a rich set of features and technology hidden in their simple product design which makes it an excellent choice for the consumer or business looking for a service they can configure once and forget. It is the best pure online service we reviewed because of the “set up and forget” user interface which require very little ongoing maintenance.

Pros

* Simple sign up procedure
* Unlimited backup space for flat price
* Free Trial period with unlimited backup space
* Least expensive unlimited service at $54.95/year
* Backs up open and locked files
* Offers private encryption key
* Backups are continuous – no need to schedule

Your say

Calahan Solutions suffered a bit of a disaster recently. This is what saved them.

Come on now! Did you really think that with all of my talk of business continuity planning that I did not have some kind of backup? I just had to get you with a bit of suspense.

My good buddy and business strategist, Joy Duling (http://twitter.com/a25hourday) told me about Carbonite a long time ago and I thought, wow too good to be true…. Then HER computer crashed. Within a few days she was able to get a new computer and recover all of her data and roll back to business, no problem. That had me sold! I was going and getting Carbonite. No more time consuming copying files to disk process for me!

Your say

This is what Alfredo – Web Designer had to say about Carbonite:

Carbonite Online Backup Service also has an official YouTube channel where customers can learn more about the product and where current users can look for videos on helpful tips and updates such as How to Change the Options in Your Carbonite Infocenter, How to Add Files and Folders to Your Backup and many more.

With what I have learned about Carbonite, I’m thinking of protecting myself with this service.

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